Context
by ScorchingCold
Summary: Flashes from the life of Peter Parker. Starts a few weeks after Peter got bitten, with Peter learning about the downsides of enhanced senses. Builds on canon, but deviates from it. No huge plot or arcs worked out. Mostly making it up as I go along. All constructive criticism (and praise!) welcome.
1. Noise

It was Friday. Friday meant it was almost weekend, and that was just fine by Peter. It had been a _long_ week.

The Academic Decathlon State championship was coming up, and study/quiz sessions were two hours now, three days a week.

On top of that, on Wednesday evening, his patrol as Spider-Man led him to a distraught man holding up traffic in the middle of a busy intersection. He spent thirty minutes patiently talking the man down from doing something he'd regret. Fortunately, he managed to calm the man and get him to safety. Less fortunately, some of the motorists were not so patient about being stuck for half an hour because of some kid in red and blue pajamas chatting with a weirdo in the middle of the road, and they made their displeasure known by shouting and honking – the full thirty minutes.

That long, _loud_ patrol on Wednesday evening led to a mild headache on Thursday morning. He was still getting used to his enhanced senses, and it was becoming clear they had downsides, too. The mild headache made getting out of bed a bit difficult, and he ended up late for class. Mr. Davis was not amused by his weak excuses, earning him a detention on Thursday evening.

So yes, a _long_ week.

Right now, he walked into the cafeteria. Hundreds of high schoolers having lunch is _not_ a quiet affair. That mild headache from Thursday morning had evolved into a freight train running through the middle of his head. He chose the most secluded spot and ate his packed lunch quickly and quietly, keeping his eyes closed more often than not. He finished his lunch, emptied his glass of water, and dropped his head on his arms. He cursed himself for forgetting the expensive noise cancelling headphones he bought for just this type of occasion.

The last period of the week was English Literature. Unfortunately, the teacher, Mrs. Donovan, decided today was the perfect day for a class discussion on French influences in the English language. Peter was counting down to the end of the school day, staring at the clock, willing it to go faster and trying to block out everything else, including the spike in his head. Fourteen more minutes until he could pack up, trudge home, and crawl under the covers with ear plugs in. He doubted he'd be ready for the world again in time to do a patrol this night.

"Peter, what do you think?"

He startled, for a moment looking like a deer in headlights. He saw Mrs. Donovan looking at him expectantly and he tried to remember the question, but he hadn't the faintest clue. The rest of the class was looking at him as well, so he ventured a non-answer, "Well, it's an interesting idea. It's all about finding that balance, I guess."

"Nice try, Peter, but empty generic phrases are not an answer to my question. I know it's last period, but the school day is not over yet. Pay attention!"

He slumped back in his chair, but dredged up his last shred of focus and tried to give the teacher whatever attention he could muster.

Finally, the last bell rang. He could get out! He packed his bag in record time and sprinted to the door to beat the hallway rush hour. But Flash reached the door first. "Leaving so soon, Parker?" Peter looked longingly to the door, but his chances of escape dwindled when Flash grinned and stepped even closer. Peter's plan of getting in front of the crowd was already doomed. He made an involuntary whine of despair. Judging by Flash's grin, the whine was loud enough for him to hear. Undoubtedly, Flash interpreted it as fear, and felt encouraged. Flash leaned over him, talking almost directly into his ear, "Maybe if you didn't spend so many nights studying trying to beat me at Decathlon, you wouldn't have so much trouble STAYING AWAKE!".

That last bit, screamed right into his ear, was too much. He couldn't take this anymore! His ears started ringing, he felt his pupils going wide, his head was splitting open, he felt pressure in his skull, he … he needed to get away!

He dodged Flash, raced into the hallway, and skidded around a corner. Students were streaming from the classes, and their excited voices seemed to carve directly into his brain. The world was just too bright, too loud! Colors popped, regular hallway lights shined like miniature suns. Each slamming locker was like a fist to his inner ear. Wasn't there any quiet place in this entire school?

He raced down the hall, saw the open doors to the gym, sprinted in, and slid under the bleachers. He sat there, in the shadows, eyes squeezed shut, hands over his ears, chest rapidly rising and falling with short, shallow breaths.

After a few minutes of trying and failing to calm down, he heard someone saying something, but he couldn't make out what it was. His breathing was still fast, and he shook his head to clear the noise. That was a mistake, the rapid motion causing a brand new lance of pain, making him squeeze his eyes even harder, struggling to get control. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him.

"Peter, what's wrong?"

He carefully cracked open one eye and stared right in the concerned face of MJ.

"I'm fine, I just need a minute, leave me be, OK?"

She frowned, turned around and started walking out.

"Wait." She stopped and looked back, but didn't say anything, obviously waiting for him to continue.

"Do you have headphones with you? Can I borrow them for five minutes?"

She didn't react for a few seconds. He had been short with her a few seconds before, so he didn't know what she'd say.

"Only if I can listen along."

"Fine."

MJ sat down next to him, took her headphones out of her bag and gave them to him. He took out his phone, connected the headphones, opened his music player and scrolled to his "emergency auditive tranquilizer" track, saved exactly for this type of situation. He turned up the volume, put on the headphones, and pressed play.

MJ lifted one side of the headphones, listened for a few seconds, and then looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

Peter ignored the eyebrow, instead focusing on the white noise now streaming through his head. He closed his eyes again and started working on slowly controlling his breathing.

They sat there, together under the bleachers, in companionable silence. Slowly, the world came back into focus, colors became less loud, and the splitting headache faded to a dull throb.

After a few more minutes, he unlocked his phone and stopped his white noise track. He wordlessly gave MJ back her headphones. He felt like he should say something, but didn't really know how to explain what just happened.

MJ looked at him again, staying silent for a few seconds, before asking, "Peter, … are you alright?"

"I'm fine, really. It's just been a long week and I've had a headache for days. Flash shouting in my ear was just the last straw." He stood up, and gave her a wry smile and a hand to pull her up. "But thank you, for the headphones and for the concern."

MJ looked like she didn't completely believe the explanation. But she just replied in a bored tone, "I wasn't concerned, you were just the most interesting thing happening right then. Don't forget Monday's Decathlon practice, loser," and walked out the door.


	2. Sticky

It kind of looked like a forest. A forest of pearly white trees, sprouting straight from concrete, slowly swaying with every breath he took. The thin tree trunks hiding huge strength. Embodying an elegant efficiency. Magically mesmerizing, so pretty…

"Peter, what's that smell?! It's ruining my sauce!"

Peter startled, lost his grip, and awkwardly fell from the ceiling to the floor. Staring up at the - now distinctly less magical-looking - forest of experimental web strands dangling from the basement ceiling, he realized he'd had his head in the fumes for just a little too long. He shook his head to get some focus.

"Sorry, May, forgot to turn on the fan again!", he yelled in the direction of the stairs to the kitchen.

He got up and activated the professionally installed fume exhaust system of his underground laboratory. Or rather, he plugged in the tiny, noisy fan he duct-taped to one of the old vents in the basement wall.

Batch #41 of his web fluid project showed promise. He finally got the strength to weight and thickness ratio he wanted, with the stuff being stronger than steel by weight. To be honest, he was proud of what he had managed to whip up so far. But the consistency was still off. Some of the strands hanging from the ceiling had lengthened or re-liquified considerably, while others had hardened too much and become inflexible almost immediately.

He got the idea for making webs after researching spider biology in the weeks after the bite. Spider silk was apparently an extremely versatile substance, with a combination of properties even high tech modern fibers couldn't match completely.

When he finished a chemistry class practical early, he used the remaining class lab time to scribble a few reaction equations for a few combinations of reagents. He hoped to work his inspiration around spider silk into a formula that would produce something similar. At least, as soon as he figured he had something that _probably_ wouldn't explode.

With the teacher busy preventing chemical burns and accidental nerve gas episodes, he sneakily threw together a first attempt in an Erlenmeyer flask. It produced surprising results. Surprising in the sense that the result was a ball of actually slightly web-like looking … stuff. Also surprising in the sense that it expanded rapidly, much more rapidly than he'd anticipated, breaking the flask while he was still holding it. Rapidly expanding and breaking stuff is kind of like an explosion, but if it's slow enough, it doesn't count, right? The whole sharp-and-sticky mess of web and flask glass covered his hand and stuck to the lab bench, still slightly growing, fizzling and popping. While Peter tried untangling his hand from the sticky mess gluing his hand to his lab bench, Flash had made the obvious jokes. The class laughed, Peter's face did its best tomato impression, and the teacher had made him stay to clean up his mess.

But the idea was born.

Soon after, he had converted Aunt May's basement to a makeshift lab with the help of his long-abandoned "My First Chemistry Kit" and a lot of improvisation. Really, dumpster diving behind a chemistry lab sounds dangerous, but the chemicals are disposed of safely, leaving tons of great stuff and old but working equipment to be found.

The fan had finally cleared most of the fumes, so he could actually see his basement workbench again. On the bench was a big microscope with a flickering monitor connected to it, a centrifuge, a compressor, a hot plate, and a mess of glass flasks and tubes, metal cylinders and stirrers, plastic pipets, and various scales and rubber tubing.

Under the guise of studying experimental chemistry, which technically wasn't even a lie, he spent several evenings and weekends down there attempting to perfect the mixture and tame the reaction. It didn't go completely without incidents. There had been some mishaps, including a small dosage mistake that May ended up calling "the Mist Incident". The mist was thick, smelled like socks, but was luckily harmless besides that. The Mist Incident was the direct cause of the installation of the exhaust fan. All in all, Peter was really happy experimenting, seeing his idea take shape. He was also really thankful his Aunt was so understanding of his experimenting.

He also tried to design a container and spraying nozzle for the fluid. He'd turned the quick expanding that caused him problems in the class practical to an advantage, since he only needed a little bit of fluid for a lot of web. But the expansion was uncontrolled, causing some parts of the web to harden almost immediately, and other parts stayed weak and liquid still.

If the inconsistency between strands was caused by uneven contact with the atmosphere when spraying from the container, perhaps a different nozzle mechanism… hmm. He grabbed one of the gas cartridges he used as container, and started fiddling.

Fifteen minutes later, Peter felt exactly like Archimedes who shouted "Eureka!" in a bathtub because he had an insight. Peter also wanted to shout "Eureka!", but he didn't have a bathtub. Besides, he didn't want to alarm May. He didn't want to push the crazy scientist vibe after The Mist Incident. Not to be discouraged, and feeling the moment still required some sort of celebration, he let out a quiet "Yay!" and a fist pump while grinning like a loon.

With the new nozzle design, the web strands came out perfect each time. Even better, with a little more fiddling, he figured he'd be able to vary the thickness of the strands, to increase the weight they'd carry.

"Peter! Dinner's ready! Wash up and get to the kitchen!"

"Coming, May!"

He quickly cleaned his work bench. He hid most of his work, including the fabulous forest, even though his Aunt almost never came down to the basement anymore. Then he washed his hands in the sink. He was still grinning from his discovery. This next batch would turn out perfect. He rushed up the stairs to the kitchen.

May saw him appearing from the basement. Noticing his grin, she pointed a spatula at him, "What are you grinning about? You're not cooking up a batch of meth down there, are you? Everyone knows you need an RV and a godforsaken stretch of desert for that."

"You complain now, but wait until we use my millions in drug money to buy a new life on a tropical island with all the cocktails.", Peter quipped.

"Sit down," May commanded with a smile, "Dinner's ready."


	3. Swing Arc

The cyclist was spending all his focus on navigating Park Avenue safely, sandwiched between cars, pedestrians, trucks, and more cars. It was chilly, and this time of year it got dark pretty early in the evening. His headlamp helped him see and be seen, but he still needed to be careful. He noticed the pedestrian leaning on the hood of a parked car, but didn't see the arm that suddenly shot out. It wiped him off his bike onto the pavement. He propped himself up on his elbows, still a bit dazed and confused, only to see the guy taking off with his bike, pedalling quickly. The entire bikejacking took only a few seconds.

From his perch on the roof edge of a highrise, Peter saw all this happening. He shot out a web to the building across the street, and launched himself from the roof edge, swinging into the street canyon in pursuit of the bike thief. At first, the bike owner had been looking on despondently, still on the pavement, helmet showing cracks and blood trickling from a scraped knee, as the bike thief disappeared in the distance, already considering his bike lost. That despondency changed to hope when he saw Spider-Man passing overhead, swinging in obvious pursuit.

After two minutes of fast paced swinging to close the distance, Peter caught up with the thief. He started swinging slower and lower to position himself to nab the thief. When his path intersected almost perfectly with the bike, he performed an acrobatic land-and-grab to bring the bike and thief to a standstill. His Spider-strength enabled him to yank the bike to a sudden stop with one hand while using his other hand to grab and lift the thief, ensuring he couldn't get away and didn't get smashed into the bike handlebars by the sudden stop. Peter felt a bit silly, holding a bike upright in one hand and a struggling thief in the other, but was happy he managed to thwart the thief.

Luckily, by then the hopeful owner had gotten the attention of a patrol cop, and it only took another minute for the cop and the owner to catch up to him. Peter pushed the bike in the hands of the owner, and the thief in the cuffs of the cop. The questions of the cop quickly evolved from basic to very pointed and nosy, so Peter jumped up against the second floor wall of the nearest building and started crawling up quickly, while the bike owner kept shouting heartfelt thanks in his direction.

Peter grinned behind his Spider-Man mask, very happy he was able to help. It had looked like an expensive bike, too. He crawled a bit higher and then swung a few blocks to put some distance between him and the nosy cop. He landed on one of his favorite perches along Park Avenue, and sat down, taking in the city.

Peter loved New York. For him, New York was his Aunt, his friends, the Academic Decathlon team, his classmates, the students at Midtown, the teachers, that one loud neighbor, Mr. Delmar (and his sandwiches!), the people around him right now, … And he felt just a tiny bit responsible for all of them.

Peter could even appreciate the bike thieves, because he also secretly loved the exhilaration of catching them, and catching them would be difficult without any bike thieves around. Sometimes he felt guilty about that last part, but that can of worms could stay nice and closed for now.

He had a great view along Park Avenue. It was only seven o'clock in the evening, but the sky was already completely dark. The lights of the traffic below him, the buildings around him, and the skyline above him made for a beautiful picture, with Avengers Towers as a crown jewel rising up in the distance to his left. For him, the tower was a beacon of heroism he could aspire to. In the past, while sitting there, he had spotted Iron Man on this route several times, rocketing back to the tower.

Peter reached into his Spider-Man hoodie and pulled out a big - and by now squished in all directions - sandwich that he'd stuffed there earlier. He got it from Mr. Delmar before he started his patrol. Ever since he started using the webs, he could cover a lot more ground, but he also burned a lot more energy, and Mr. Delmar's sandwiches had become a crucial food group on patrol days.

He unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite. Perfect cheesy goodness filled his mouth. He devoured the entire thing in no time.

As he was chewing on the last bite, he heard a familiar whine to his right. In the far distance, he spotted a tiny dot, recognizable by its glowing repulsors. Iron Man was returning to Avengers tower.

Peter stuffed the sandwich wrapper back in his hoodie and tracked the dot as it flew closer. It looked like he was in the perfect spot for getting a nice fly-by. He had seen enough Iron Man approaches (and maybe watched a few more on the internet, he was a self-admitted fanboy after all) to know that Iron Man either flew high and slow for direct descent onto the tower or low and fast, probably for avoiding too-easy tracking.

By now, Iron Man was only a couple hundred yards away and this time it looked to be an exception to the pattern, with Iron Man flying low and slow.

In fact, Peter realized, if Iron Man kept losing altitude at that rate, he'd hit the pavement long before being anywhere near the tower. Now that he was close, Peter also saw the repulsors were not firing continuously, but blinking in and out, making the flight path a bit erratic. This wasn't a normal approach, this was a crash landing!

Jumping up in a blink of an eye, Peter did some quick mental math. He had to time and aim this perfectly. He stretched his arms and squinted along them to aim. He counted off a "Three …, two ..., one,", launched webs from both wrists and immediately braced his feet against the slightly elevated building edge. He felt more than saw his webs connect and immediately spring taut. Not a second too soon, because Iron Man seemed to be only fifteen feet above the pavement by that time. He gripped both webs, swinging Iron Man in an upwards arc by using Iron Man's momentum and pulling heavily to counter the force. Just at the top of the swing arc, with a final tug, he guided the heavy armor onto the roof not far from himself, instead of letting it swing back down.

He quickly approached Iron Man, who was studying the repulsor in his suit glove.

"Are you OK?", Peter asked.

The Iron Man mask focused on him, and for a second or two, Peter understood how the mask with the glowing eyes could be described as menacing. It exuded an intense and powerful focus. A power backed up by the arc reactor and an intensity backed up by the analytic mind of the man in the suit. Peter started feeling as if under a microscope, but then the faceplate opened up, and Iron Man replied, "I'm fine, I'm the one in an armored suit here, you're the one casually swinging fast-flying suits of armor around, your arms must've gone out of their sockets, at the very least!"

"Oh, uh, n-no, I'm fine. Can I help you with anything else? Can you get to the tower? Do you need repairs?"

"Yeah, no, I'll just call Happy, he's already underway. Did you just ask me if I could get home OK like I'm some damsel in distress? Are you sitting here fishing, waiting for failing flying suits to fall from the sky? And are those cables attached to your wrist? How you didn't at least dislocate your shoulder is incomprehensible!"

"Oh, actually, they're not attached, I just grab the cable, it's got a surprisingly good grip.", Peter rubbed his neck and unconsciously took a step back. Iron Man asked a _lot_ of questions.

"Just grab the cable… with your bare _hands_?! How strong _are_ you?"

Peter started feeling as if under a microscope again. "Oh, well, I just, well…" This was going wrong, he wanted to help, not get a third degree questioning. Maybe he should stick to making a quick exit after the save.

And Peter jumped off the building, quickly swinging away.

Tony stared at the disappearing red and blue dot swinging down Park avenue that just saved him from, at minimum, an embarrassing crash. His suit was in no condition to give chase, and Jarvis' scan hadn't revealed any weapons or ill intent in the body language, but still...

"Jarvis, get me everything you can find about this guy."


End file.
